Everything You’ve Ever Been Told About How You Learn Is A Lie

The first of these “lies” is the one that that the students in my TA Prep (Teaching Assistant Preparation course, for PhD students learning to be teaching assistants) courses most often say back to me. The third lie (where “___” is “computer programming”) is a pernicious one among CS teachers.

When I was in middle school and high school, teachers loved to impart various tidbits of wisdom about the way students learn during lectures, always couched in such a way as to indicate these were scientifically accepted facts. You know everyone learns differently. Do you think you learn better through words or pictures? Did you know you learn different subjects with different sides of the brain?

Welp, they were wrong. Many of the theories of “brain-based” education, a method of instruction supposedly based on neuroscience, have been largely debunked by rigorous science. Brain-based education studies are usually poorly designed and badly controlled. Nevertheless, myths about how we learn persist in the popular imagination, and, most importantly, in educational materials and references for teachers.

One might also quite simply define ‘teaching’ in terms of ‘learning’. Teaching can only be said to have occurred, if ‘learning’ has occurred. If the ‘teacher’ has successfully altered the students’ response patterns, then ‘teaching’ has occurred. In short, the difficult bit to swallow – if they’re not learning, you’re not teaching.

Absolutely true, Carl, but that doesn’t relieve the teacher of the responsibility of providing the best possible teaching. They are being paid to teach. To use methods that are less than what research shows works, or worse, to use methods that research has shown do not work, is wrong.

Carl, it wasn’t a value judgment. One could have the world’s best ‘learn Russian’ lessons and present them to a Golden Retriever – but it wouldn’t be correct to say that ‘teaching’ is occurring.
With ‘teaching,’ as with communication, there has to be a give and take. If your interlocutors don’t speak French, then talking about Galois in French to them has no advantage.
As teachers, we have to ask ourselves how much we need to do to help students learn. This is where the important conversations have to take place. Should CS be a field where only those (with thick skins) who can grow on remote cliffs with a few bits of de-contextualized code embedded thick in theory are allowed to flourish? Or should CS strive to promote a much healthier base, with rolling fields of aspirants who are nourished with the guiding hand of understanding, empathetic, and pedagogically knowledgeable mentors?

Carl – apologies for the flowery prose. I know that students can be very frustrating. In more objective terms – it’s important to note that every student’s behavior can be shaped so that they are computer scientists (and/or programmers). It seems that the expectation is frequently that more learners will be ‘taught’ to be computer scientists without much modification of the “teacher’s” behavior (i.e. lessons, delivery, scaffolding, use of personal & cultural relevance, etc.) – that can’t happen. This goes back to Mark Guzdial’s point – teachers have a duty to provide the best possible instruction (i.e. most effectively construct the contingencies and environment to shape novice CS students’ CS behaviors) – only after doing that should there be discussion of students’ problematic behaviors in response to CS ‘teaching’.

Unfortunately the article is not quoting the most recent research. There is brain-based research that discusses much more than this article. It chose the most incorrect information because it makes a nice story. I am a bit disappointing that you, as a college prof, chose to quote this article without more research on the topic.